Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, as a member of the English ruling class. He was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, a great biologist who helped develop the theory of evolution. His mother was the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist and the niece of Matthew Arnold, the poet. She died from cancer when he was 14.
When Huxley was 16 and a student at Eton, an eye illness nearly blinded him. He recovered enough vision, however, to go on to Oxford University and graduate with honors, but not enough to fight in World War I, or to do the scientific work he had dreamed of doing. But Huxley retained his interest in scientific ideas, which he used in many of his novels. His interest in literature started in Oxford, where he met writers like Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, and D. H. Lawrence, with whom he became close friends.
Huxley published his first book, a collection of poems, in 1916. In 1919, he married Maria Nys, a Belgian. Their only child, Matthew Huxley, was born in 1920. The family traveled around the world in the 1920’s, seeing India, parts of Europe, and making a first visit to the United States. Huxley wrote Brave New World in four months in 1931. It appeared three years after the publication of his best seller, the novel Point Counter Point. During those three years, he had produced six books of stories, essays, poems, and plays. In 1937, he and his family came to the United States; in 1938 they went to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. He remained for the rest of his life in California; therefore, one of his novels caricatures what he saw as the strange life there: After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
In 1958, he published Brave New World Revisited, a set of essays on real-life problems—overpopulation, overorganization, and psychological techniques from salesmanship to hypnopaedia, or sleep-teaching. In the 1950’s Huxley became famous for his interest in psychedelic or mind-expanding drugs like mescaline and LSD, which he apparently took frequently over ten years. He wrote two books based on his experience taking mescaline under supervision: Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956). Another work centering on drugs and sanity was Island (1962), a novel that required 20 years of thought and five years of writing.
Huxley remained nearly blind all his life. Maria Huxley died in 1955, and Huxley married Laura Archera a year later. He died November 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He was cremated, and his ashes were buried in his parents’ grave in England.
One of his best sellers is Point Counter Point, in which Aldous Huxley experimented with a completely new type of novel. It has many plots, running synchronously, and the scenes change often to contrast the different viewpoints.
Walter Bidlake lives with Marjorie Carling, who left her husband for him. He, however, seems to be annoyed by her desire for love and lack of reason. He desires another woman, Lucy Tantamount, whom he plans to meet at the party, to which Marjorie is not invited.
Walter likes to be alone with a woman, whereas Lucy prefers much company. She does not like the people at the party; therefore, she suggests to Walter that they visit the Rampions and Spandrell instead. Although he would prefer to be alone with her, he agrees. After they have a long conversation with the Rampions and some other guests, everybody leaves but Lucy, Walter, and Spandrell, who takes them to a communist club. Late at night, Walter returns home to Marjorie, who thinks that he hates her and wants her to die. He promises not to see Lucy again, but to spend all evenings with Marjorie.
On the next day, Lucy calls Walter at work and tells him to come to her. He cannot resist the temptation, but when he finally arrives and sees that he was not the only one she invited, he leaves. When Marjorie then rejects him for lying to her about his visiting Lucy, he decides to go back to Lucy.
Walter and Marjorie finally reach an unspoken agreement: Although he knows that she does not love her, he visits Lucy, and nobody talks about it. Lucy finally decides to go to Paris; Walter has too much work to go with her. She writes him letters from France, telling him in the last one that she had found a new lover there.
Philip Quarles is married to Walter’s sister, Elinor, who thinks that he does not love her anymore, that he does not give her anything in return for her love. He likes logic and reasoning, but she is more concerned about emotional values: their love for one another and for their young son.
Elinor finally decides to take Webley’s lover to make Philip jealous. However, Maurice Spandrell and Illidge, a communist, kill the Freeman Webley for political reasons. When Spandrell finally tells the Freeman the truth, they shoot him.
Even more popular and celebrated than Point Counter Point was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a novel set in the future, in the year AF 632. Bernard Marx, the hero, is an Alpha Plus psychologist; he belongs to the highest social class. He and his friend, Helmholtz Watson, are different from the others members of their class: Bernard is smaller and likes solitude, which is, according dangerous to Brave New World society, whereas Helmholtz is too smart for Brave New World society.
The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning for Central London, Bernard’s employer, spent a vacation in the New Mexican savage reservations, where he lost Linda, his girlfriend, in a thunderstorm. Years later, Bernard takes Lenina Crowne, a typical member of her class, to that reservation for a vacation, where he discovers Linda and her son, John. In the society of Brave New World, children are hatched in bottles and nursed in conditioning centers operated by the government, because the World State Controllers want to prevent people from having close relationships with others, thereby endangering social stability. Therefore, the idea of having children or getting married was considered offensive and obscene.
After bringing John and his mother back to England, Bernard embarrasses the Director by revealing the fact that he had a son. Huxley can now contrast the values of the two cultures when John tries to live in modern England: For example, he loves to read Shakespeare, whose works are now forbidden, and he believes in close relationships that can lead to marriage. Trying to show his affection for her, John annoys Lenina with his references to love and marriage, which she does not understand. Because of his values he tries to help the people by taking away their soma, a drug similar to opium, but without the side effects, but the people are too stupid to understand his good intentions. Finally, John, together with Bernard and Helmholtz, who tries to help him, comes to the World Controller.
Mustafa Mond, one of the World Controllers, explains the system of society to the Savage and tries to make him understand why they have to be conditioned, restricted, and drugged—for the sake of stability. Bernard and Helmholtz are sent to an island, where they can no longer be a threat to society. The Savage, given the choice between civilization and instability, finally decides to commit suicide.
In “Fantasy as Technique,” one of the essays in his book SF: The Other Side of Realism, Rudolf B. Schmerl talks about Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as being a satire as well as a fantasy, with the fantasy being a vehicle for the satire. He describes the World State as a “satiric projection of popular values and associated uses of science in the real world of 1932.” In his opinion it is, however, difficult to treat Brave New World as primarily a satire, because although it is wholly fantasy, it is not wholly satiric.
Peter E. Firchow says in “The Satire of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’,” that Brave New World is a satire of the future as it is implicit of the present. To be able to satirize the present more effectively, Aldous Huxley has to gain some distance by detaching from the present. He does that by setting the date to AF 632 and, therefore, having the action take place in the future. His satirical point is that if progress on earth continues at the same rate as it is right now, then the only possible result would be “a brave new world.”
In fact, the critic John Colmer talks about the irony in the title “Brave New World,” which Aldous Huxley took from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Colmer points out that there has already been an implicit irony in its original context, when Miranda calls the villains of the story the people of the “brave new world.” He shows Huxley’s criticism of twentieth century trends by talking about the satire in Brave New World.
[Brave New World] constantly reminds us of the worst features of our own society. Sex is separated from love, procreation, and marriage. Literature has degenerated into mere emotional engineering, in other words, advertising and propaganda. Religion has become meaningless mumbo jumbo, emotional rituals for achieving group solidarity. Soma has replaced alcohol as the source of joyful oblivion but, unlike alcohol, it is non-addictive and produces no hangovers. Sport has become completely mechanized, its main purpose being to maximize consumption.
Martin S. Day compares Huxley’s introducing of John the Savavge with Swiftian satire. John chooses the way of freedom and life rather than the consciously determined environment and predetermined human organism toward which, Huxley thinks, modern culture trends.
The mass-produced humanity six hundred years hence will believe their world perfect, but it is the living death that cares for the flesh by destroying the spirit.
Huxley replies to the request of a changed and improved society with an implied plea for the changed and reinvigorated individual.
Finally, John Chamberlain has his own opinion about Brave New World:
[In Brave New World Huxley] has satirized the imminent spiritual trustification of mankind and has made rowdy and impertinent sport of the World State whose motto shall be Community, Identity, Stability.
Huxley thinks that the slogan is against human nature; mankind always moves forward from one unstable equilibrium to another one: It is natural for our societies to be unstable. Huxley tries to warn man about wanting too much stability and forgetting about his human nature.
The technique of Point Counter Point, Huxley’s contribution to the experimental novel, is derived from music, as suggested by the title. According to Martin S. Day’s History of English Literature, 1837 to the Present, Huxley states theme and countertheme; then they develop separately, followed by a restatement of each theme. Thus, he repeats the motifs and offers abrupt transitions.
The themes—birth, love, and death—are played within the circle of people known to Philip Quarles, who is a surrogate for Huxley. These themes are repeated as perversions: “…sadism in Lucy Tantamount, adolescent thrill-seeking in the cynical Spandrell, pseudo-artiness in Burlap, fascism in Webley, lechery in Quarles senior, selfish egotism in John Bidlake…”
In his “novels of ideas,” Huxley compared and contrasted various ideas and human traits while satirizing pseudointellectual vanities. The Contemporary Literary Criticism calls Point Counter Point “Huxley's finest accomplishment in this mode.” He uses his knowledge of music to make the novel “[unfold] like a musical composition; through constant juxtaposing of themes, moods, characters, and scenes, he portrays the flow of life through a fragmented presentation that the reader must unify.”
In his essay “The Early Poetry of Aldous Huxley,” Charles M. Holmes talks about the dialectic styles of Aldous Huxley. He used to transform his dialectic style into the sparkling conversations of the novels, but with Point Counter Point, he used his “ironic” style, which was “an even more congenial voice, destined to be the one his public wanted to hear and most frequently heard.”
The tone of Point Counter Point soon became characteristic of his fiction. The style depends on the ironic contrast of the unexpected; the irony also involves setting the real against the ideal by putting human beings into a zoo.
Francis Wyndham thinks that from all the characters in Point Counter Point, Mark Rampion and his wife Mary are the first figures to be treated with a minimum of irony. Yet, the irony is infectious, and readers catch it by mistake, so that unintentionally Rampion emerges as a pretentious bore. The critic Murray Roston talks about the use of music in Huxley’s Point Counter Point to once again point out the ironic connection between music and the style of the novel. Roston particularly likes the two passages on Bach at the beginning of the work saying that they are delightfully written--amusing, ironical, and presented with the panache of the true satirist.
Yet as one might expect from a true satirist, beneath the surface humor lies a deeply disturbing question. After warning us how each player in the orchestra imagines that his is the only true statement and, as that truth slides away and is replaced by another, leaves us bewildered by the complexity and variety of such supposed truths, he begins to describe the Bach fugue. For him such music represents not only absolute beauty, but also to supreme proof to the soul that there is an ultimate harmony, order, and goodness in the universe.
Critics still debate whether they should consider Huxley a major or minor figure in twentieth-century literature. Although Brave New World is considered a classic examination of modern values and utopian vision, other critics still believe that Huxley was not necessarily an innovative writer. However, his early novels are still read and discussed for their description of life in England during the Post-World War I era, and his eloquent discussions of a wide range of ideas are consistently stimulating.

Bibliography
Bryfonski [no first name]. Contemporary Literary Criticism 11. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1979.
Day, Martin S., Ph.D. History of English Literature: 1837 to the Present. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1964.
Draper, James P. Contemporary Literary Criticism 79. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1994.
Gunton, Sharon R., Contemporary Literary Criticism 3. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1975.
---. Contemporary Literary Criticism 18. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row, 1946.
---. Point Counter Point. New York: Harper Collins, 1928
Stine, Jean C. and Daniel G. Marowdki. Contemporary Literary Criticism 35. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1985.